A Formal Kind Of Terror
by Ms. Creepypasta
Summary: After his sister is killed by a strange creature known as The Slenderman, Sam and his friends must find answers to answer her mysterious death. But will the teens survive to find the answer to this morbid riddle? Rated T for violence and gore. Cover image belongs to whoever made it.


**A Formal Kind Of Terror**

_Prologue_

An impossibly tall figure with incredibly long arms made his way through the forest, his shape illuminated by the weak moonlight that filtered through the canopy of leaves and pine needles above. He didn't know his exact destination himself, but his Hunger for bloodshed led him forward. The Hunger was constantly present in the back of his mind, at times biting down like a wild creature and refusing to release its hold until its desire for blood and death had been fulfilled. It had existed since the dawn of his creation, and it's sharp bite had never failed to spur him on.

His instincts alerted him that a family was camping nearby, and he moved silently in their direction. He soon reached the edge of a clearing surrounded by pine trees thick with pine needles. Hidden from view, he observed his future victims. A young girl, around the age of six, was seated at a weakening campfire along with who could only be her parents and a teenage boy who was probably her brother. The girl and her parents were talking and laughing while the boy stared at the iPod in his hands, headphones in his ears.

The girl noticed the dying fire and jumped up. "I'll go get more wood!"

"Okay, sweetie," the father smiled before turning to the boy, being sure to take out one of his headphones to get his attention. "Sam, go with her."

Sam stood, sighing with irritation, and followed her out of the clearing, iPod in hand. The girl wandered farther away, picking up twigs, as her brother leaned against a tree, engrossed with a game involving unusually-shaped birds and what appeared to be slingshots.

The tall figure followed the girl as she left her brother farther and farther behind. As she knelt down to pick up another stick, she looked over her shoulder and saw him. Her eyes widened with a mixture of fear and shock, and she dropped the sticks she had gathered in a fanatic attempt to scramble backwards.

"W-who are you?" she whimpered as he loomed over her.

"_I am kn(x)wn by many names. In Germany, I am called Der Großmann. Here, I am kn(x)wn as The Slender Man,_" he answered, his voice cold and clear, even though it hadn't come from any apparent mouth.

The child only had time to let out a shrill scream before her life was ripped from her in a single movement.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/

After hearing the child's cry, the family was still combing the forest for her hours later. Sam carried a crushing weight of guilt on his shoulders as he searched through bushes alongside his parents, calling out his little sister's name over and over. The light from his flashlight sweeped along the ground and across tree branches as he continued to call her name.

"Annie! Annie! Where are y-" he stopped mid-sentence, the beam of his light trained on the branches of a skeletal tree unlike the others around it.

Sam's mother cried out and fainted when she turned to look at what her son had found. His father fell to his knees by her side, supporting her as he stared, open-mouthed, at the horror illuminated before him. Sam fough back the urge to throw up as he gagged. He knew he should look away, but he couldn't take his eyes off the gruesome sight.

Annie's pale, blood-caked corpse was skewered on a branch, her entrails half-torn out and her glassy eyes partially closed.

"W-what's on the trunk?" Sam's father choaked out.

Sam followed his father'r gaze, which led to a piece of paper stuck to the tree. The hair on the back of his neck rose as he realized that it hadn't been there a moment ago, but shook the feeling off. Nobody would have been able to put it in such plain sight so soundlessly and in such plain sight without being spotted. He edged warily toward it, keeping his eyes from wandering upward to look at his sister's mutilated body.

There was a message scrawled in black ink across the page, and it sent a shiver up Sam's spine as he touched it.

_What a p(x)(x)r br(x)ther y(x)u are, Sam. All(x)ing y(x)ur sister t(x) die this way. D(x)n't w(x)rry, th(x)ugh. I'll be back f(x)r y(x)u._

At the end of the message, the same symbol used to replace the letter o in the words was drawn crudely, and it blazed with a strange aura of darkness.

"What does it say?" Sam's father asked, his gruff voice hollow with grief.

Sam handed it to him, his hand shaking as fear pulsed through his veins. His father took the page with his free hand, as he was supporting Sam's mother with the other, and inspected the words.

"An advertisement for free frozen yogurt?" he scoffed through tears over his dead daughter. "Does that demented person think that _yogurt _will make this forgiven?"

Sam blinked in surprise. "W-what?" He took the paper back from him and examined it. The same eerie message glared at the scrawny teen. It seemed to be mocking him.

"_See y(x)u s(x)(x)n, Sam,_" a voice chuckled darkly from the shadows before the creature speaking disappeared from the forest without a trace.

**A/N: In case you didn't know, the (x) symbol is supposed to be the Operator Symbol, but the site won't let me use the actual symbol, so that will do. **


End file.
